The Good Lawyer

Usually I dislike watching movies that are dubbed, because the intensity of the actors who are visible is often reduced considerably by the actors doing the dubbing. You almost get the impression that it's 'just a job and we'll have it done in a couple of days.' You feel as though whoever directs the dubbing process doesn't really have his or her heart in it. I'm happier watching an original language version with subtitles.

While it's an accepted fact that actors who dub movies are generally not well paid, you come across the occasional movie which shows from the go-get that real effort has been put in not only to match the voice of the original actor as far as possible but also for the voice actor to give the same amount of effort to the role as the original actor does. 

Such a movie is The Good Lawyer which we watched last night on Netflix. This movie has the advantage of a well-crafted script (even if the workings of the big bad company is a bit obscure), one that gives the actors - especially the one playing the main character - plenty of scope for playing within a wide range. 

Laurent Lafitte plays the lawyer of the title, Maítre Léonard Landry. He blasts his way through a superb opening sequence in which he's simultaneously trying to pursue his craft in two different trials at once while zipping off to snort coke downstairs in the toilets and there finding himself under attack from a bunch of henchmen who, of course, want their money - or at least their boss does. All this chaos is intermixed with him catching out the judges, other lawyers and anyone else in sight with his devious legal mind. 

So, this is a good lawyer? Plainly the writer had a different version of good on mind. But the film isn't done with Landry. By the end of the movie he will have come to see himself as he is, and is beginning to think of himself differently. 

Apart from the constant collisions of the plot's various stories, he's helped to this new place - at first unwittingly - by a 31-year-old legal intern named Noé Henry, a self-effacing and modest little man (little by contrast to the height and cinematic weight of Landry) who increasingly comes to see Landry's (few) qualities and tries to keep him on track. Anthony Bajon plays this character, a man whose morality is several steps higher than his boss. He provides a good deal of the warmth that's intentionally lacking in the early parts of the movie, and gets to be at the centre of the few funny moments in the story. 

There's some violence in the film, though it's mostly kept at a low level, and, surprisingly for a European movie, no sex scenes. Incidentally the French title is Un Bon Avocat, which even more seems to be asking a question rather than stating a fact.